Developing teacher competencies to facilitate student-centred learning

Dr Saranne Weller

Associate Dean Learning, Teaching and Enhancement

University of the Arts London

Student-centredness means…

• engage students in active learning experiences

• increasing student responsibility and autonomy

• recognising the diversity of our students

• seeing our students as whole persons

• paying careful attention to the power relations

Student-centred teaching involves…

• rethinking the use of declarative, content-heavy lectures

• introducing short periods of discussion

• using multiple-choice quizzes or short answers tests at the beginning of a new topic to test student prior knowledge or revise key concepts

• scaffolding student note-taking with mind maps or concept-mapping

• introducing field-trips, problem-solving and applied real-world experience

Some common doubts (Attard et al., 2010)

• student-centredness is actually only possible in certain disciplines

• student-centredness is difficult to implement in large groups or high enrolment programmes

• student-centredness undermines the expertise and professionalism of teachers

3 competencies for student-centred learning (Weller, 2015)

1) being student-centred means being subject-centred (Hobson & Morrison-Saunders, 2013)

2) paying attention to the social experience of learning through collaboration

3) rebalancing the power relationship between teachers and students

1) Being subject-centred • making the disciplinary “ways of thinking and practising” accessible to students (Meyer & Land, 2003)

• challenge “seeing [students’] encounter with a discipline in terms of an all-or-nothing acquisition of an “object” (Anderson & Hounsell, 2007)

• “decode the disciplines” (Middendorf & Pace, 2004) to identify obstacles or “bottlenecks” where students’ learning can be blocked

• these “bottlenecks” can sometimes be “threshold concepts” or “gateways” that allow students to access new ways of knowing (Meyer & Land, 2005)

“Decoding the discipline” (Middendorf & Pace, 2004)

Identify where students get stuck

Explore how an expert does it

Model this as an expert

Enable students to practice

Identify how are students motivated

to engage

Align assessment tasks

Why we need to “decode”

• “one of most effective things we can do [as teachers] is simply bring our attention onto the subject at hand, and enable our students to join us in this mutual enquiry” (Hobson & Morrison-Saunders, 2013)

• expert knowledge is likely to be highly codified and tacit

• outputs of our own disciplinary or practitioner enquiries in teaching, publications or presentations often conceals certain aspects of the process (Hay et al., 2015; Weller, 2010)

The first step in being student-centred

• defining and making visible to students the features of disciplinary thinking

• consciously modelling them for students as an expert “insider”

• breaking down and scaffolding student attempts to adopt these practices

• creating opportunities to practice and get feedback on their performance

2) Student-centred learning as social

• recognising the diverse needs and motivations of individual students does not mean student-centred learning is only possible in one-to-one settings

• in large groups, student-centred learning is possible if we reframe one-to-many as many-to-many

• exploit the opportunity for students to engage in collaborative learning in groups (Ackermann et al., 2007)

Collaborative learning activities

• create a glossary of key terms and concepts (Meishar-Tal & Gorsky, 2010)

• write and peer review reflective journal or blog of group learning in work contexts (Kear et al., 2010)

• co-write a laboratory report or fieldwork report

• use concept maps, diagrams or photographs to capture group brainstorming or group work

• collate resources into a reading pack or protocol for conducting an experiment (Parker & Chao, 2007)

3) Students-as-partners • elicit our students’ prior knowledge and build on this in teaching to value the resources our students bring to learning

• engage students in designing their curriculum (Delpish et al., 2010)

Example 1, UG Law at Liverpool John Moores University (Brooman et al., 2014)

Example 2, UG Environmental Justice at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, UK (Bovill, 2014)

• emphasise the role students play in their own learning (Bovill, 2011)

Conclusion: becoming student-centred

1) critically reflecting and making accessing on our disciplinary “ways of thinking and practising”

2) exploiting the opportunities of many-to-many ways of making knowledge through collaborative learning

3) rebalancing the power relationships to work with our students-as-partners in learning

Thank you

s.weller@arts.ac.uk

Academic Practice Saranne Weller “A wealth of theoretical perspectives and exemplifying case studies “

References (1) •Anderson, Charles and Hounsell, Dai (2007) ‘Knowledge practices: “doing the subject” in undergraduate courses’, The Curriculum Journal, 18(4): 463−78.)

•Attard et al. (2010) Student-Centred Toolkit (Education International & The European Students' Union)

•Bovill, Catherine (2011) ‘Sharing responsibility for learning through formative evaluation: moving to evaluation as learning’, Practice and Evidence of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 6(2): 96−109.

•Bovill, Catherine (2014) ‘An investigation of co-created curricula within higher education in the UK, Ireland and the USA’, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 51(4): 15−25.

•Brooman, S., Darwent, S. and Pimor, A. (2014) ‘The student voice in higher education curriculum design: is there value in listening?’, Innovations in Education and Teaching International. DOI: 10.1080/14703297.2014.910128.

• Delpish, Ayesha, Darby, Alexa, Holmes, Ashley, Knight-McKenna, Mary, Mihans, Richard, King, Catherine and Felten, Peter (2010) ‘Equalizing voices: Student-faculty partnership in course design’, in C. Werder and M. Otis (eds.), Engaging Student Voices in the Study of Teaching and Learning. Stylus: Sterling, VA. pp. 96−114.

• Hobson, Julia and Morrison-Saunders, Angus (2013) ‘Reframing teaching relationships: from student-centred to subject-centred learning, Teaching in Higher Education, 18(7): 773-83.

References (2) • Kear, Karen, Woodthorpe, John, Robertson, Sandy and Hutchison, Mike (2010) ‘From forums to wikis: perspectives on tools for collaboration’, Internet and Higher Education, 13: 218−25.

• Meishar-Tal, Hagit and Gorsky, Paul (2010) ‘Wikis: what students do and do not do when writing collaboratively’, Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 25(1): 25−35.

• Meyer, Jan and Land, Ray (2003) Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising within the Disciplines. Occasional Report 4 (http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk/docs/ETLreport4.pdf).

Meyer, Jan and Land, Ray (2005) ‘Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning’, Higher Education, 49: 373−88.

Middendorf, Joan and Pace, David (2004) ‘Decoding the disciplines: a model for helping students learn disciplinary ways of thinking’, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 98: 1−12.

• Parker, Kevin R. and Chao, Joseph, T. (2007) ‘Wiki as a teaching tool’, Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, 3: 57−72.

• Weller, Saranne (2011) ‘New lecturers’ accounts of reading higher education research’, Studies in Continuing Education, 33(1): 93−106.

•Weller, Saranne (2015) Academic Practice: Developing as a Professional (London: Sage)